My dissertation project is on the democratization of business corporations. Business corporations hold enormous power. They govern important natural resources, command immense financial assets, set the conditions for public discourse through control over media, and as employers rule over large portions of their employees’ lives. State control over these exercises of power has in many instances been unable to prevent bad outcomes. Think for example of the Enron accounting fraud, the Global Financial Crisis, or the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Additionally, regulation is only a very indirect means for those most strongly affected by corporate rule to gain control over important aspects of their life. After all, having control over the powers that govern core aspects of one’s life is a core democratic principle. What then justifies these largely unchecked exercises of power? Conventionally, they have been justified by pointing out the private character of business corporations. But that justification has come increasingly under pressure in legal and political theory. There is increased scepticism as to whether private property can ever justify the kind of wide-ranging power that business corporations have. This argument has been especially prominent in the workplace democracy debate where authors point out the extent to which workers’ lives are governed by their employers and argue that property conferring power over people is a feature of feudalism, not democracy.
I take this and similar arguments to be largely successful. Theorists have convincingly established that the current scope of unchecked corporate power is unjustifiable in a democratic society. Business corporations should therefore be democratized, i. e. changed away from the current framework where ultimate control rests only with shareholders towards a framework in which democratic rights are spread more widely. My dissertation then develops a more comprehensive framework for what it could practically mean to democratize business corporations and how this could happen. I do so in the spirit of recent methodological arguments around realist political theory and non-ideal theory, paying special attention to considerations of feasibility, ability, and motivation in social change as well as empirical examples. My argument on democratization proceeds in three steps. First, I provide a clarification of the normative claim grounding the demand for democratization. If corporations are to be democratized, who constitutes their legitimate demos? Here I use insights from general political theory on the boundary problem to argue that the democratization of business corporations properly understood must involve a number of constituencies beyond workers, such as consumers, suppliers, and local communities. This argument has been published as a standalone paper in Political Theory.
I then turn towards the question of feasibility. After all, one of the challenges most often brought up against the democratization of economic institutions is that it is simply unfeasible. To counter that claim, I use recent conceptual work in non-ideal theory and first examine the general status of feasibility claims in the debate. I then examine the two constitutive parts of feasibility, accessibility and stability. Accessibility concerns the question whether an agent can achieve a change from where they currently are. Here, I show what paths there are towards democratization, what agents have the power to pursue these reforms and what their incentives regarding democratization are. I illustrate my argument here with a thorough treatment of an ongoing citizens’ movement in Berlin that campaigns for the expropriation of large corporate landlords. From the core claims of this movement I develop a general expropriation policy as a tool for corporate democratization. This part of my dissertation has appeared as a standalone paper in the European Journal of Political Theory. Stability concerns the question whether agents in an institutional framework can perform the actions required for that framework to persist. Here, I present core challenges for democratized business corporations, focusing especially on the threat of non-cooperation by formerly powerful actors like managers. I argue that these actors could justifiably be temporarily disenfranchised and perhaps even coerced into cooperating in running the democratic corporation. I am currently finalizing a standalone paper making this argument, planned for submission in November 2023. Overall, my dissertation thereby helps to advance the debate around democracy and business corporations. Whereas much existing work either focuses on the basic normative point or champions a single reform framework, I provide a systematic way of thinking about democratization as a social process, its realistic possibilities, risks, and conditions of success. I thereby also show how the recently developed methodological commitments to non-ideal plausibility and realism for political theory can be executed in more concrete research.